


A Leaf Must Fall

by islasands



Category: Adam Lambert (Musician)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-31
Updated: 2013-01-31
Packaged: 2017-11-27 15:07:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/663401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/islasands/pseuds/islasands
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is no summary for this kind of story.</p><p>For Parigi88 with all my love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Leaf Must Fall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [parigi88](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=parigi88).



"A Leaf Must Fall"

 

The Famous Jug Band

 

  


 

 

And how it must be. That's not an easy thing to say. Yet it has to be said so I might as well go ahead and say it.

You cannot lose someone you never actually found. Someone you never actually held in your arms all night long, protectively, wholly and potently, as though you are darkness itself. His head on my shoulder and my arms deadened because I don't want to adjust my position in case he turns over. The smell of sex escaping now and then from the warmth of the bed as though sex between us is a living thing that has its own breath and can sigh. And I am awake the way I like to be awake, awake and in charge, love's sentinel, watching over him in the dark, feeling the pensive strength of his hand lying on my chest, his fingers at ease, the touch of his fingertips as light as the touch of light. And when I think about it, his effect on me is just like the day's early or late light, - he bathes me in himself, unwittingly, in his reticence, his plain speech, his anxiety over choosing to please himself and not others, his losing battle with love, his fear of it. For he does love me. We both know it. Across distances the size of a table, a room, a continent or even and often an ocean, we both know it and feel the cords tightening even as we loosen them.

There is a poem about this state of affairs. What is it? I found it in an old recipe book that my grandmother had handed down to my mother. It was written in my mother's hand and I remember wondering why she had copied it out. On one page there was a photograph of a table set with garish flowers and a woman in a flesh pink dress, cinched at the waist with a shiny black belt, was smiling at the food she had made, ghostly looking food, the colours and shapes of innards. And on the other page, recipes for party hostesses of the 70s. And a poem hidden between these pages and I assume it is hidden because my mother, according to her memory banks, only ever loved my father. Maybe not. Maybe he came later, when the one she loved was lost to her.

Here it is. I copied it out in a journal I kept at age eighteen.

A FAREWELL

What is there left to be said?  
There is nothing we can say,  
nothing at all to be done  
to undo the time of day;  
no words to make the sun  
roll east, or raise the dead.

I loved you as I love life:  
the hand I stretched out to you  
returning like Noah’s dove  
brought a new earth to view,  
till I was quick with love;  
but Time sharpens his knife,

Time smiles and whets his knife,  
and something has got to come out  
quickly, and be buried deep,  
not spoken or thought about  
or remembered even in sleep.  
You must live, get on with your life.

And here I am, getting on with my life, as my mother, apparently, got on with hers. And there is no chain of regret around my neck, nor do I feel sad as I write these things. My heart simply feels as though a full moon has risen to float forever in its sky, its face lit by the light of a heavenly body that never sets, never dies, never stops shining the torch of its love in my direction. I can live with that. I can love with that, and indeed I do love and for all I know I do it more carefully and precisely than when I was younger in spirit and passion. A dove may not have lighted on my outstretched hand but a white heron is standing amidst the reeds of my mind's stream and I am entranced by it. It stands so still that I hold my breath. I don't move a muscle for I want it to stay and be beautiful for me. He taught me to do that and I am grateful for the skill. I needed to know how to shed leaves and not to mind when my branches are bare. I needed to know that buds will always occur. Sap will shunt through my body after the winter has been and gone, and leaves will come out of me to drink up the sunlight and shudder in the wind.

And that is how it was. And how it will be.


End file.
